Overcoming the acceptance of mediocrity in teacher
recruitment and retention represents the greatest opportunity to bring major
improvement to our schools.

Overcoming the acceptance of mediocrity in teacher
recruitment and retention represents the greatest opportunity to
bring major improvement to our schools.

Some teachers are better than others. This is a simple and, I hope,
obvious fact. But the culture of American schools is not friendly to
it. Particularly in our hiring of public school teachers, we tend to
avoid notions of serious discernment, of picking the very best in our
society to become our teachers, and we accept that the most talented of
our young people will gravitate to other fields. Overcoming this
acceptance of mediocrity in teacher recruitment and retention
represents the greatest opportunity to bring a quantum improvement to
our schools.

To focus on the elite among new teaching recruits as a matter of
method is, in fact, the radically democratic way to give our society's
most valuable resources to our poorest and neediest children. That
simple fact should trump any concerns about the ill effects of
meritocracy on job applicants. The work of educators is to educate
young people. So long as we have the courage to make the very best
possible experience for those young people our highest goal, we must
attend to fairness for teachers only after we have attended to
excellence for our students. And we have yet to do that right. Today,
the best teachers in many schools are in a way the dissidents, the
people who stand out, who attract criticism as well as praise for being
remarkable educators, and they resist a strong pull toward mediocrity
in the professional culture of too many schools.

We must recognize that this is a problem, and we must fix it. The
solution is not difficult to imagine. New teachers must come to know
that there is an early-career, merit-based threshold to cross, similar
to what doctors, lawyers, and many business professionals face in their
first few years of professional work. If we can make this a reality,
the most talented and most effective among them will be able to earn
their place in a truly elite, dedicated corps of teachers. We will keep
the very best of the new teacher recruits, and we'll attract large
numbers of people in other professions who today don't sign on to
become teachers because they believe that American schools haven't
fostered a culture of achievement and haven't been able to make the
profession of teacher as respected or respectable as many other
professions.

In many school systems today, new teachers are, officially, on some
kind of probation for a period, often three years. But these
probationary periods in fact don't relate to job performance. So long
as performance is not outright criminal or grossly harmful to children,
new teachers in these districts will keep their jobs. The money in
school budgets is the key to launching or limiting their careers. In a
budget cutback, the probationary teachers are the ones whose ranks are
trimmed, because they are generally not fully covered by unions, and
are therefore easier to let go. So long as we do not screen new
teachers based on excellence—not based on mere competence, not
based on basic skill levels, but based on demonstration that each
individual is better at teaching than most who try—we will never
be able to create and reinforce the kind of elite professional culture
among our teachers that they deserve, and, more importantly, that our
students deserve.

Consider the college student planning to become a teacher. And
consider not just any student, but the kind of student we most want to
be teaching our children—someone who is bright, warm,
disciplined, and interested in the ideas of other people, someone
curious about the world, and capable of doing difficult things
well.

At the age of 21 or so, he is finishing college, heading toward a
degree in English, biology, history, or another subject. Most likely,
he is not taking a degree in education (the students with the strongest
academic backgrounds generally don't).

In his senior year, he is probably working as a student-teacher for
at least part of the year, going off in the mornings to a school where
the students call him "Mister." He takes a coffee break in the
teachers' lounge now and then, a junior colleague of teachers young and
old. His friends who are not planning on becoming teachers are
studying, heading off for the occasional job interview, and spending a
great deal of time as college students do—enjoying independence,
hanging out, reading interesting books, thinking about the future. In
this local culture, the student-teacher is a standout. He's in the real
world, seen by many as a full adult citizen, clearly bearing serious
responsibility for the many students he deals with on a regular basis.
This is a person with prestige in his community of college friends. He
is a person who can easily feel good about his choice to be a
teacher.

So long as we don't screen new teachers, we we will
never be able to create the kind of elite professional culture among
our teachers that they and our students deserve.

Roll forward a year, now. Our young teacher is getting his sea legs
before his own class—teaching on his own, with a mentor teacher
checking in now and then perhaps, and a little extra support from the
principal if the principal has the time and interest. He's solving
problems, developing relationships with students, and working through
one of the most difficult and rewarding phases in a teacher's life.
He's also making an adult salary, though not a particularly large one.
He's probably taking courses toward a master's degree in education or a
related subject in the evenings.

His friends are doing a range of things—taking time off to
travel, working in jobs that might be the beginnings of their own
careers or might help them learn what they don't want to do for a
living, or perhaps they're beginning graduate or professional schools.
Remember, we're talking about the social circle of the kind of young
teacher who should be prized—the talented, ambitious young
person. His friends are probably a lot like him—they're people
with plenty of options who are looking for the right paths to exercise
their own talents and build meaningful lives. Some are likely to be
starting law school or work on an M.B.A.; some are taking entry-level
business jobs; some are moving back home to their parents' to
decompress from four years of college, save some money, and consider
their choices.

Their friend the teacher is probably making as much or more money
than most. He's probably taking on greater personal challenges in his
day-to-day work, and he's working in the public sector, making a
difference in the education arena that so many commentators spill so
much ink over in the newspapers and magazines. He's no underachiever.
He looks to the world like a person with a vital and important
professional life.

Now look forward another three or four years. The teacher's friends
are less likely to be business or law students, and more likely to be
business people and lawyers. Those who took the academic route might
well be considering the beginnings of their Ph.D. dissertations. Even
those who took the lowest-level business jobs are now likely to be
reaching modestly higher rungs on the career ladder.

Certainly some of his friends might still be traveling, or still be
living at home, working jobs that aren't panning out and thinking about
the right changes to make. But on the whole, our young teacher, who has
by now gotten the hang of how to be a classroom educator and has the
skills to walk into class with confidence and break into a lesson
without too much nervous perspiration, is one of the lower earners in
his cohort, and probably feels a good deal less like the leader of the
pack.

"What do you guys do?" someone might ask a table full of them at the
local pub. "Well, I'm a med student, 4th year." "I'm a lawyer over at
Huddle & Pass." "I'm an editor at a national magazine." And our
teacher says, "I teach 3rd grade," or "I teach high school biology." No
need to feel ashamed, of course. But there's not a lot of prestige for
him to grab hold of as he tells his professional story. At the age of
25 or so, that might not be a big deal; time will change that.

People benefit so much from being part of a known
elite that they'll put off the chance to make more money
elsewhere.

Roll forward another 15 years. Our teacher is now 40. His friends
are now law partners, business people, doctors, writers, scientists,
and professors. Where is he in his career? He could be at the head of a
3rd grade classroom, teaching the children of some of his first
students from student-teacher days. He's probably picked up a doctorate
along the way, as 20 years of steady night courses have yielded their
benefits. And he might well be the happiest of all his friends.

As they face their own moments of reflection—What kind of
contribution am I making? What personal satisfaction am I really
getting from my work? What kind of community do I have at work, day to
day?—the teacher's answers could be very satisfying. I'm changing
lives every day, shaping the minds and souls of my students, he might
say. I see the results of my work every day when I look at my students,
bump into kids I taught years ago, learn to do my job better every
year. And I work in a hive of activity, energized by the youth of the
students and the profound purpose of the institutional home we
share.

Or maybe he decided to give up teaching. He might have decided at
the age of 30 or so that he wanted his children to have the economic
advantages he could garner for them through business or law,
professions that draw on similar skills and aptitudes. In the business
world, he could probably triple his salary, though he'd have to trade
off the nobility of the educator (and summers off). Or he might have
decided that he really wanted the greater freedoms of the
professor.

But the most likely ending to this story—not a sad ending by
any means—is the compromise position of the educational
administrator. With his above-average skills and real dedication to the
mission of schools, he is now probably a principal, a district
curriculum director, or an associate superintendent. What do you do for
a living? I'm a lawyer. I'm a VP at Giant Corp. I'm a high school
principal. Or, I'm the head of a school system. That sounds pretty
good—and the money isn't shabby for those jobs in most cases
either.

Interestingly, many business people know that as an organization's
standards go beyond merely "above average"—as it earns, in other
words, the reputation of being an elite institution, where only the
most talented people work together—the cost of employment begins
to fall. People benefit so from being part of a known elite that
they'll put off the chance to make more money in order to get other
kinds of compensation—knowledge, pride, and the intangible value
of having a notable, elite affiliation.

Many elite institutions across American public life are driven by
this dynamic. Why else do the most talented lawyers often work for the
government at a fraction of what they can earn elsewhere? Why are our
universities filled with so many of the best and brightest of our
professionals, there to study and teach, making so much less than they
could elsewhere? Why else do young doctors (and many not so young)
spend years beyond medical school earning small salaries as they train
for greater and greater specialization?

Let us create the expectation that most who begin
their careers as teachers won't make the grade, and those who do will
be truly the best and the brightest of every generation.

And why should our K-12 schools not be in the same category? Once we
come to believe that they can be, and that we know how to make it so,
how can we possibly choose any alternative course?

Perhaps out of fairness, one might say. We want our teacher corps to
be a humane institution—not to be driven by the competitive fires
that ignite even the judicial law clerks and top-drawer graduate
students and university lecturers. It's true, we could be fairer to
teachers, to make the profession a little less competitive, a little
less demanding. In fact, that's precisely the situation we're in now,
and we have discovered that by being fairer to the
teachers—particularly to the less talented and less ambitious
teachers—we make our students bear the cost, essentially taking
from our students to give to our least talented teachers.

And of course it is the poor students, whose parents cannot opt out
of the schools they are in (because they don't have the money for
private schools, or the skills at working the educational bureaucracy
necessary to find their way to the top of the heap in public school
systems) who pay the highest price.

In an era of real reform in American education—and our era
certainly qualifies—it is high time that we begin to change this
fact. A tougher apprenticeship period for new teachers is the place to
begin. Let us create the expectation that most who begin their careers
as teachers won't make the grade, and those who do will be truly the
best and the brightest of every generation, while those who enter the
profession and leave in those early years will be proud to
say—and will benefit from saying—"I was a teacher."

Peter Temes is the president of the Great Books Foundation in
Chicago.

Peter Temes is the president of the Great Books Foundation in Chicago.

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